Song of the Day: 'A Heart Needs A Home,' Richard & Linda Thompson

A very grim ride, right up until the end: Richard and Linda Thompson's "Hokey Pokey"

Linda Thompson's experience with Sufism was, by her own reckoning, not such a good one. She moved to a commune in Maida Vale with Richard, then her husband, after making "Hokey Pokey," and she describes her experience there as grim and self-punishing. For awhile, Richard's mullah told him not to play the guitar, so he didn't play the guitar. Richard & Linda Thompson, British folk-rock royalty, disappeared for a few years in the mid-'70s.

Before they did, they sent this epistle. "A Heart Needs A Home" pointed straight toward the "Pour Down Like Silver" LP, Thompson's most explicit bout of Sufi songwriting. "Home" caps "Hokey Pokey," a collection of songs that describe the world as a cold, forbidding, sin-soaked place. Richard Thompson turns to Allah in emptiness, and finds fulfillment there.

Odd, then, that he didn't sing it. He gave the song to Linda. Perhaps he identified with her so strongly back then that he felt no separation between his perspective and hers. Or maybe he was trying to convince her of something. Since leaving the commune (and the marriage), she's occasionally suggested that her heart was never really in it; that she followed Richard to Maida Vale because she loved him, and she wore the headscarf because that's what was expected of her.

Do we believe her? She certainly does not look uncomfortable singing "A Heart Needs A Home." On the contrary: Linda Thompson is completely possessed, her eyes on the great beyond. Maybe she's singing about Richard, maybe she's singing about Allah. Maybe it doesn't matter. The Sufis have a concept called wahdat-al-wujud: God is the only reality, and all that we perceive is a decipherable pattern emanating from Allah. Nothing exists that isn't a piece of the divine. Linda might have got it better than the mullah did. She might have got it better than Richard did.

This clip is quiet, I know. Listen carefully and you'll find it loud enough to turn you inside out.

Songs of the Day are posted weekdays at 3 p.m. For past Songs of the Day, click here.